MARS: Medipix All Resolution System
4.5 Million Smiles
Monday, 14 July 2008 00:00
The University of Canterbury is all smiles - three projects led by University of Canterbury researchers have been awarded more than $10 million funding in the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology’s main 2008 investment round.
Professor Butler’s project aims to create a New Zealand industry supplying spectral x-ray detector systems to the international research and medical imaging markets.
“The transition from black and white to full colour in photographs, cinema, television and computer monitors has been much more dramatic and important than anyone predicted. We anticipate that true full-colour x-ray images will also be very dramatic and have positive impact on health care in New Zealand and the world,” Professor Butler says.
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Brilliant New Technology.
Our aim is to create an industry supplying digital spectrally resolved detection systems to the small animal and medical imaging market.- We use the Medipix spectroscopic photon counting technology
- Spectroscopic x-ray imaging is a hot topic for research in the medical devices market.
The human eye sees the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum as a rainbow of colours. In contrast, current medical x-ray detectors see the x-ray part of the electromagnetic spectrum in monochrome. X-rays are the workhorse of biological, medical and industrial imaging systems worldwide. To gain a sense of the importance of detecting x-rays in colour, imagine looking at landscape of green forest where you can detect the subtle variations of green. You can see the brightness range of light green to dark green, as well as the blue-green, the greenish-yellow, the leaves with a reddish tinge, and so on. There is no comparison with a black and white photo of that landscape that shows only shades of grey. The benefits from using Medipix detectors to see x-rays in colour are huge.
The Medipix Chip
Last Updated (Sunday, 06 July 2008 07:07)
Various medical physics papers over the past decades have shown the promise of spectroscopic data by using non-imaging detectors. The MARS imaging chain allows researchers and clinicians to routinely image the spectroscopic characteristics of tissue.
